Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Friday June 19, 2009 @05:02PM
from the never-ending-war-of-escalation dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Developers of Google's Chrome browser have spoken up in an article describing their approach to keeping the browser secure, focusing on minimizing the frequency, duration, and severity of exposure. One tool Chrome uses is a recently open-sourced update distribution application called 'Omaha.' 'Omaha automatically checks for software updates every five hours. When a new update is available, a fraction of clients are told about it, based on a probability set by the team. This probability lets the team verify the quality of the release before informing all clients.'"

Well Google is a synonym for Beta so no surprise here then . . . well actually the surprise is that they are restricting the pleasure of betaness to a selected few rather than their usual approach of using the great unwashed duped into the 'not evil' mantra . . .

A bit passe to reply to your own posts but the mod is right. I started out writing a side splitter but the beer decided that it should turn into a troll post. Pints and posting do not mix! Buenas noches;)

No, they're getting a random sample of their user base to test a ready-for-release patch so that in case there are a couple cases not within their testing scenarios where the patch is unstable or a security hole is present, they will be able to address that (if it's serious enough) before releasing it to the whole world. This is so much better than the current way of doing things, because patches are still tested in the shop to the same degree as they would be without Omaha, except this way there's even more to be sure that the patch works correctly.

But let us be fair here: How many fricking machines are running Windows? How many hundreds of thousands or even millions of different hardware and software configurations? Just in my home I have a 733Mhz, a 1.7Ghz laptop, my boys 2.6Ghz and 3.06Ghz, and finally the 3.6GHz I'm about to give the oldest, all running XP32, while I am running XP x64 on my new AMD dual. They all have hugely different hardware and software installed, yet somehow it just seems to work.

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] you are looking at a 400 million + install base for JUST XP, and then when you figure in that they are currently supporting Win2K Pro, WinXP 32/64, WinServer 2K3 32/64, and WinVista the idea that they could put out patches that wouldn't break something is just plain crazy. The fact that the "oops" patches only happen once or twice a year is frankly a miracle when you consider how many different possible combinations of software/hardware there can be on a Windows machine.

How many times have you see on the forums after the latest Ubuntu release "the update for foo completely hosed my (insert hardware here)"? I'm sure the Linux guys doing hardware driver support can tell you what a massive PITA it is trying to make sure an update doesn't totally hose something else, and still there are always problems. So considering the fact that unlike certain companies named after fruit I can put a machine together with so many different mish mashes of hardware together and actually have the thing work and run stable I think we can cut the guys at MSFT a little break when it comes to the occasional "oops" patch.

Someone sure must hate me. Every post I made in the last day is modded troll.

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] you are looking at a 400 million + install base for JUST XP, and then when you figure in that they are currently supporting Win2K Pro, WinXP 32/64, WinServer 2K3 32/64, and WinVista the idea that they could put out patches that wouldn't break something is just plain crazy. The fact that the "oops" patches only happen once or twice a year is frankly a miracle when you consider how many different possible combinations of software/hardware there can be on a Windows machine.

Usually a random person from MSFN submits fixes for whatever Microsoft breaks. I remember when they did a half-assed update pack for Win2k when ending support - but it broke more than it fixed. Someone on MSFN figured out how to fix it breaking hibernation and power management. Someone else repacked everything in service pack format.

Just think, rather than breaking 2 million Win2k computers, they could've broken only ~20,000 before

Yes Linux works IF, and here is the really fucking big IF, you do research on every single fricking purchase from now until the end of the PCs life. That just cut out a good 95% of the population, including all of my customers. I said customers because yes, I build, repair and sell Windows PCs for a living, so yes I have installed more XP copies than you have had hot meals.

As for installing drivers? It takes about 20 minutes. How? by either using the Windows driver from Universal 2K/XP Driver DVD [blogspot.com] or Driverp [driverpacks.net]

I dunno, dude. My sister lives in Israel and her laptop recently broke, so I offered to send her a new one as they are insanely expensive there and I had an old HP nx7400 lying around. What I did not have was a Windows disc of any kind, so I put Ubuntu on it for her. It installed in forty minutes with all the drivers working properly, including video, ethernet, wireless, and sound -- four things I've never seen work properly out of the box on any Windows install.

I wish more companies would do this with patches. Historically, some non-trivial percentage of all patches (to some OS or software) also caused a new bug under some small percentage (like 10%) of the possible software configurations out there. It's better to patch, cause issues, and roll back on a few thousand users than a few hundred thousand. A week later, the quality for all users is the same.

I wish Google would fix its gaping security holes at all; I don't care how they do it. On my Gentoo Firefox 2 I'm invulnerable. On my XP Chrome, accidentally clicking an on.nimp.org link necessitates a hard power down. I'm paranoid about every click on Chrome.

The methodology--i.e. random users--is not necessarily ideal, though. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a "labs" option in the browser so you could volunteer to be a guinnea pig? Then maybe after the early adopters, feed out the updates at a rate of 10% a day to hoi polloi.

Any time you release a new version of software, there's an increased likelihood that there will be unforeseen bugs not specifically tested for. You can test tell you're blue in the face, but no matter how you look at it, real-life is the real test.

And it's not just bugs. Even when things are working exactly to plan, you don't necessarily want to roll it out everywhere all at once.A good example is our password-change policy - we now require periodic changes in passwords. When we did this, requiring everybody to change their password, we did it "gracefully" over a month's time so that the help desk wouldn't be overwhelmed by idiots who don't understand the idea of changing their password.

It's pretty sad that something so simple would cause people to freak out, but it does, and that's just humanity. Get over it, already. People are people, and it's easier to spread the work out over a period of time rather than just beat yourself up all at once.

Gradual roll-out is a *good thing* unless it's a terrible security issue that must be addressed immediately.

Now if they could stop running googleupdate crap ALL THE TIME (maybe use the OSs built in scheduling system to run every so often) and give me more control over when/how things get updated it will be much better.

It _is_ killable - ironically, part of what you have to do is delete the job from the scheduler which restarts the damn thing every so often.

It could do with a more user friendly ticky box to turn it off, but it's not completely evil.

One thing I've never understood is why MS didn't expose the Windows Update facilities to other vendors (with user approval, of course.) A one-stop shop for updates a la Ubuntu's Update Manager would be a hell of a lot less messy, and it would actually work for people who do the Right Thing and don't run with Admin / Power User privileges.

If you have to open administrative tools and disable it's scheduled task just to turn it off, it's pretty damn evil. As is bundling it with every application, with no clean version available (or at least, no clean version that aren't buried in a forum link somewhere).

An anecdote: last time I installed Google Earth, I immediately ran the uninstaller for Google update (incidentally, the Google Earth installer makes no mention that it is installing the Google Updater for you). Not a few minutes later, Comod

Here goes... If *I* know how to add a scheduled task to windows scheduler at install time (when I have the god-admin-rights) - how google does not? Oh yes, it knows... but it does not want it to be simple. Do no evil. I always put a (unchecked).CMD file backup task to the whathever-install that I make. Could not google do the same? Yes.

Every 5 hours?Fraction?Probability?Set by the developer?Verify the quality?

Yeah, no thanks.

I want updater services to DIE.

Check for an update when I launch your program, and give me the option to turn it off.Don't run in the background all the time.

Give me the option to manually check for updates.If there are updates, list them and let me choose whether not to install them. Also supply details about the update, preferably without making me launch your web page.

Tell me which updates will require restarting the program. Tell me how large they are. Give me the option to download now, and install later.

Quality test the fucking updates yourself.All users should be able to get the update at the same time, with a probability of 1.

The problem is if they do that, then 90% of the non-power user internet users won't EVER update. Which means security flaws are never patched. Which means they get a bad name for not fixing a problem that was patched 5 months ago.

I admit that patchers and automatic updaters are a real headache and I wish most of them would just die already... But the simple fact is I'm a power user. Most people (of which my brother is one) don't care. He would rather it handle his business for him cause it's one less thing

Microsoft believes that IE8 is the greatest browser that has ever existed, and that will ever EXIST, sure chrome, firefox and opera are mean to children, drown puppies and are generally horrible, but do they really deserve this??

I found the page may have at least had some truth, if everywhere Internet Explorer was said, you replaced it with opera.

"Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats"

"Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3, but Internet Explorer 8 invested heavily in having world-class, consistent support for the entire CSS2.1 specification"

"Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser"

"Google Chrome must support plug-ins such as Flash Player and Silverlight so users can visit popular Web sites such as YouTube. These plug-ins are not designed to run in a sandbox, however, and they expect direct access to the underlying operating system. This allows them to implement features such as full-screen video chat with access to the entire screen, the userâ(TM)s webcam, and microphone. Google Chrome does not currently run these plug-ins in a sandbox, instead relying on their respective vendors to maintain their own security."